Anonymous attacks PlayStation websites to protest lawsuits

5 Apr 2011

The loose hacktivist collective Anonymous earlier took down a number of Sony PlayStation sites to protest Sony’s legal action against PlayStation 3 jailbreakers.

Opposing Sony’s lawsuits against PS3 hackers such as George Hotz, Anonymous conducted a series of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on Sony PlayStation sites and, according to The Register, had brought down the UK PlayStation 3 site and the European PlayStation store. They are back online at the time of writing.

Sony recently filed a lawsuit against a number of PlayStation 3 hackers. The electronics company previously stated that, by bypassing protection measures on PlayStation 3 consoles and making them public, the jailbreakers violated numerous laws, including the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, along with copyright infringements for its proprietary code.

While the hackers claim they do not condone piracy, Sony fears that, if information on how to jailbreak PS3s is made public, people could operate pirated games on their consoles.

Anonymous’ statement

“You have abused the judicial system in an attempt to censor information about how your products work,” read the statement.

“You have victimised your own customers merely for possessing and sharing information, and continue to target those who seek this information.

“In doing so you have violated the privacy of thousands of innocent people who only sought the free distribution of information.

“Your suppression of this information is motivated by corporate greed and the desire for complete control over the actions of individuals who purchase and use your products, at least when those actions threaten to undermine the corrupt stranglehold you seek to maintain over copywrong, oops, ‘copyright,’” the statement read.

Private property

The statement also pointed out that Anonymous is attacking these sites because its members believe Sony is attacking people’s private property by not allowing them to hack and jailbreak their own consoles.

“Having trodden upon Anonymous’ rights, you must now be trodden on,” read the statement.

“If you disagree with the disciplinary actions against your private domains, then we trust you can also understand our motivations for these actions. You own your domains. You paid for them with your own money. Now Anonymous is attacking your private property because we disagree with your actions,” it read.

Anonymous was behind other hacktivist movements, such as for Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks. It undertook DDoS attacks on sites which withdrew support of Assange, such as Visa.com.